{"id":7077,"date":"2023-09-07T09:01:53","date_gmt":"2023-09-07T16:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=7077"},"modified":"2023-09-07T09:41:58","modified_gmt":"2023-09-07T16:41:58","slug":"digital-transformation-through-mastery-of-the-microsoft-employee-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/digital-transformation-through-mastery-of-the-microsoft-employee-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital transformation through mastery of the Microsoft employee experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MicrosoftDigital transformation is an important topic for most organizations, and we\u2019re often asked to share the specific steps that we have taken to transform the Microsoft employee experience in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms Microsoft. This series highlights how we accomplished this internally across two key pillars of the digital transformation journey: empowering employees and transforming operations.<\/p>\n

At the heart of this transformation is an obsession with the Microsoft employee experience.<\/p>\n

\"Job
The Microsoft employee experience is the nexus of where Microsoft employee\u2019s personal needs and employee needs are both met.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In our view, the employee experience is a nexus where personal needs and employee needs are both met. When this is great, employees are highly satisfied with the experience and are very productive. The activities that hit the mark on this range from generic experiences applicable to all employees\u2014like finding available meeting rooms, searching for internal information, or understanding their benefits\u2014to more role-specific experiences, like manager insights to support their teams or loading sales data into a CRM system.<\/p>\n

The employee experience isn\u2019t limited to day-to-day activities; it\u2019s considered throughout the employee\u2019s lifecycle: from onboarding and internal role changes through to retirement.<\/p>\n

A keystone to empowering employees in how they do their jobs is to understand what employees need by identifying their top challenges and successfully meeting their needs. Before our digital transformation advanced in earnest, we would make changes without fully understanding whether they met our employees’ needs and we often wouldn’t do enough to help them adapt to the changes. This was met with limited success.<\/p>\n

Getting to a better place required a change in mindset, as shared by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: \u201cAs a culture, we are moving from a group of people who know it all to a group of people who want to learn it all.\u201d To learn it all, we began establishing listening mechanisms to learn from our employees, recognizing that as technologies advance, employee expectations of their devices and experiences advance as well, with increasing expectations that both work seamlessly to enable them to do their best work.<\/p>\n

[Read the second blog in the series on how Microsoft is transforming the company’s employee experience by listening to employee signals<\/a>. Read the third blog in the series on how investment prioritization is driving the transformation of Microsoft\u2019s employee experience.<\/a> <\/em>Learn how Microsoft Digital is reinventing the employee experience at Microsoft.<\/em><\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

Strategies for capturing employee signals<\/h2>\n

When we started down the path of understanding our employees\u2019 needs, we realized we had to develop a comprehensive set of employee signals first. To us, signals are indicators of employee satisfaction with the tool or service. Examples of signal sources include employee survey data, direct interviews with employees or leaders, and product usage data (we\u2019ll explore these sources in greater detail in a moment). Our strategy relied on some signal sources that were already in place, but to meet our goals, we expanded our sources to ensure we listened to all employees.<\/p>\n

Being a global enterprise, we had to consider our many cohorts of employees\u2014all countries and regions; all roles, including individual contributors, managers, and leaders; the locations of all workers, including remote, in-office, and hybrid. We needed to make sure we didn\u2019t exclude picking up signals from any group.<\/p>\n

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Using employee signals to identify employee challenges.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We used existing data trends to understand our employees without disrupting them (such as telemetry and usage data). This informed an initial indication of where pain points or adoption blockers might be.<\/p>\n

We also needed to hear directly from our employees to confirm or alter those initial impressions, so we established several proactive mechanisms to gather feedback. The following diagram shows an example of some of the signal types used to gather this data. We will explore some of those listening signals more here.<\/p>\n

Proactive employee signals<\/h2>\n

We gather proactive signals preemptively, and they\u2019re critical in helping us understand what our employees think. Here are several ways we proactively gather those signals and some of the expected outcomes we have for them:<\/p>\n